Month: March 2012

Today marks my last day as a solutions architect for a reseller. I have been working on and off for resellers since college and very infrequently have I seen a technology that I thought could be a true game changer. The last one I can think of was VMware, and as many of you are aware that has played out well for me over the past few years. While I have learned so much working for both Convergence Technology (@convergencetech) and Clearpath Solutions (@clearpathsg) in the reseller world, I got an offer too good to turn down. Make sure to go follow them both as they have alot of smart guys (and girls). So after much thought it was time to trust my gut again.

Starting on Monday I will be the Federal / Mid-Atlantic Solutions Architect/Sales Engineer for Nexenta(@nexenta). For those of you not familiar with Nexenta, they have been listed as the fastest growing storage startup ever. The interesting thing on that is that they are actually a software company. Nexenta was started in 2004 and came out of stealth in 2008. As a small and growing company that focuses on the virtualization, big data, and storage space, I felt they were a great fit. NexentaStor is the flagship product built on the ZFS filesystem. allows SMB to Enterprises to use commodity hardware with NexentaStor layered on top as fully functional enterprise class SAN and NAS units. The feature set is actually much larger than I would want to put in this one post so expect more to come as I get more and more ramped up.

The great part is I will also still be able to be heavily involved with VMware. I will also be joining as the third member of Nexenta’s Virtualization sniper team (I just made the name up but I like it). I will be joining Theron Conrey (@theronconrey) and Tom Howarth (@tom_howarth) to help Nexenta continue to grow the relationship and integration with virtualization products.

I am really excited and looking forward to this next step and my first with a manufacturer. Thank you to all that have supported me to here and heres to a great new adventure.

Over the past year I have been lucky enough to spend quite a few days with the HP team learning about converged networking and systems and how they feel it all fits into “the cloud.” This week HP kicked off a new series of roadshows to bring the same depth that I got to see at shows like HP Discover to the general public and without you having to travel. With more companies looking at Flexpods and vBlocks then wondering how to get in at a slower pace and not just buy the whole thing at once, HP has tried to set up some building blocks. If you just have HP servers you may already have a few of the pieces according to their cloud evangelists. Follow the link below to sign up for any of the local shows. To make it a little easier I included the schedule. I know I learned alot during these type shows not completely about HP but even just concepts and ideas that I can apply to so many other vendors and solutions.